Alert! Top South African novelist Zakes Mda has been accused of plagiarism by US academic Andrew Offenburger, in the most recent edition of Indiana University’s scholarly journal, Research in African Literatures.
The accusations relate to the novel many consider to be Mda’s greatest achievement in fiction, The Heart of Redness. First pubilshed in 2000 by Oxford University Press, the book, centred on the rural Eastern Cape, traverses two eras: the immediate post-apartheid period on the late 1990s, and the time of the notorious Xhosa Cattle Killing in the mid-1800s, when a young woman named Nongqawuse prophesied freedom from colonial persecution through the mass slaughter of the Xhosa herds.
As Mda acknowledges in the novel’s dedication, his primary source of information about the Cattle Killing was Eastern Cape historian JB Peires’ masterwork, The Dead Will Arise, a book that compellingly reconstructs the events that led up to what another commentator has called the Xhosa nation’s “cultural suicide”. Mda writes:
I am grateful… to Jeff Peires, whose research – wonderfully recorded in The Dead Will Arise and in a number of academic papers – informed the historical events in my fiction.
For Offenburger, this acknowledgement does not go far enough to cover the more than 80 instances of verbatim copying, paraphrasing and other types of borrowing that he enumerates in his article, entitled “Duplicity and Plagiarism in Zakes Mda’s, The Heart of Redness“. His accusation is delineated in the article’s abstract:
Hailed as “the first great novel of the new South Africa” (“Mda Sets Tone” 12), Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (2000) received widespread critical acclaim for intertwining numerous dualisms—modernity/tradition, belief/disbelief, city/country, youth/elders—to create a vibrant and complex postapartheid novel. The Heart of Redness acknowledges historian Jeff Peires’s The Dead Will Arise (1989) as “informing” the novel’s historical events, centered on the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of the 1850s. Careful examination of the two books, however, reveals an abuse of textual borrowings and significantly undermines the novel’s literary value. This article questions the use of historical materials in The Heart of Redness by surveying past syntheses of history and literature in writings on the Xhosa movement, and by exploring issues of intertextuality and plagiarism in African literature. Based on this analysis, The Heart of Redness should be understood as duplicitous in two ways: as a novel that explores binary themes, but also as a derivative work masquerading plagiarism as intertextuality.
Mda, who teaches at Ohio University, was given the chance to respond to Offenburger’s incendiary piece before the journal’s publication, and wrote a comparatively laconic refutation, but one that gives no ground. A key thread in his response reads:
The author’s list of all the phrases, sentences and passages paraphrased (or “borrowed” to use his/her term) from The Dead Will Arise is impressive but it is not original. It is very similar to the list compiled by Sara Colombana in her examination of intertextuality between The Heart of Redness and three other texts, including The Dead Will Arise. One major difference is that Colombana reaches a more intelligent conclusion… And by the way, intertextuality is not peculiar to postcolonial African literature. It is an international post-modern phenomenon. It is even found in music in the form of “sampling” and in art in collages composed of images borrowed from other creators. In The Heart of Redness I go beyond the practitioners of sampling and collaging because I credit the originator of the historical narrative that has influenced my novel so profoundly.
Both articles are available for online purchase from Indiana University Press:
Locally, South Africa’s The Weekender was first to cover the story:
PROMINENT South African writer Zakes Mda has had to defend himself against allegations that he borrowed too much from a historical text for his widely acclaimed and award-winning novel, The Heart of Redness.
A 36-page critique in the prestigious American journal Research in African Literatures, questions “the blurring lines between history and literature, inter- textuality and plagiarism in postcolonial African literature”, concluding that Mda’s novel abuses the creative licenc e afforded postcolonial and postmodern literary practices.
The Heart of Redness, Mda’s third novel, is the story of Camagu, who returns to SA from the US after 30 years in exile. Through love, he is caught up in rural politics and sucked into the tensions between “believers and nonbelievers” — vestiges of the historical Xhosa cattle killing that provides the foundation for the novel.
BOOK SA has contacted both Oxford University Press and JB Peires for responses to Offenburger’s accusations, and will publish any statements we receive on this blog. Meanwhile, two questions persist: is Mda’s brief mention of Peires’ work in his dedication sufficient to exculpate him completely from the charges at hand?; and – does Offenburger’s scholarship legitimately diminish the literary merit of The Heart of Redness, or does it merely amount to ambitious nitpicking?
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